Using a custom domain

Assigning the domain

You can do this through the web UI by clicking “Set up domain” when viewing your site settings.

You can also assign domains through the CLI tool with the netlify update command.

We highly recommend using a www domain instead of an apex domain (ie. www.example.com instead of example.com. Unless your DNS provider supports ANAME or ALIAS records for the apex domain you won’t be able to take full advantage of our CDN unless you use the www prefix or a similar subdomain.

DNS configuration

The recommended way to point your custom domain to our servers is by creating a CNAME record in your DNS configuration. This record will be an alias to your site’s subdomain on Netlify.
For instance, if my domain is example.com, I would create a CNAME record for www pointing www.example.com to example.netlify.com.

There are two options if you want to serve your website from a naked domain, without the www.

Recommended: Use a DNS provider that supports ANAME or ALIAS records for apex domains, and alias your naked domain to <your-site-name>.netlify.com. We recommend using NS1 for this purpose.

Depending on your DNS provider changes to DNS records can take several hours to propagate, so be patient.

Domain Dashboard

Netlify offers the option to hand over DNS configuration to Netlify with our Domain Dashboard.

Step 1:
The first step starts with you entering your domain into our form. Click the button allowing us to manage your domain needs.

Step 2:
Once you have connected your Domain, the final step is to switch your domain host’s name servers to our custom NS1 name servers, which we provide in the instructions section of the domain panel. If you don’t see the list, you might need to click the ‘show details’ button.

Each Domain is different, here are links to find out how edit your nameservers on Hover and GoDaddy.

Note: If you have previously assigned a custom domain to Netlify, you will need to delete the previously created A and CNAME records from your DNS provider to avoid DNS conflicts.

Branch Subdomains

In the dashboard Netlify can automatically turn your deployed branches into its own subdomains.

For Example: If you have a branch named staging, you can view it at staging.example.com. Use the ➕ in the list to activate a deployed branch as sudomain.

A subdomain can be deleted by clicking the red remove button in your list
of DNS records below.

Naked domains?

You can use Naked domains with Netlify, but we recommend you always use the www version of the domain (eg. www.example.com) for your site. This makes it easier to take advantage of Netlify’s powerful CDN.

If you prefer the naked domain, we recommend you use a DNS provider that supports ANAME or ALIAS records for apex domains such as DNSimple or DNS Made Easy. If you set an A record for the apex domain, you won’t be able to take advantage of the full Netlify CDN. If your provider lets you set an ALIAS, the full CDN will work. If not, your assets (Javascript, CSS, images) will be served out of a global CDN, but your HTML will be served out of our primary datacenter in the US.

Domain redirects

We’ll automatically set up redirects for the alternative domain to the primary domain. So if you use www.example.com, we’ll configure example.com to do a 301 redirect to the www domain. If you assign the naked domain to your site, we’ll redirect in the opposite direction.

We only redirect automatically between the root domain and www. Not any other subdomains.

Domain aliases

You can setup domain aliases for your domain, so the same site will be rendered on several different domains. You can use domain aliases together with rewrite and redirect to redirect or rewrite based on the current domain of the site.

Notice something is incorrect or outdated?

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